A sentimental education

First in the US, now here: the fronts of the neocon culture war passing over the universities seem (surprise!) to be misguided.

An Australian Senate committee has turned up little evidence of left-wing bias in the academy.

The committee found Liberal student organisations were the main agitators for the inquiry and their submissions had a strongly "undergraduate" tone.

"Indeed, the committee believes that the case that Make Australia Fair [the Young Liberal group] makes for the existence of a leftist conspiracy in education faculties and schools borders on the farcical," it said.

Farcical!

This is not surprising. Having worked for a year side-by-side with these polo-shirted young idiots, they lack a coherent sense of their own politics, let alone an ability to coherently criticise (or characterise) someone else's politics.

It may be an optimistic position, but it seems like the mood has passed for this kind of thing. In Australia, that seems to have happened with the removal of John Howard from office. In the US, with the imminent departure of Bush. It has always been wrong to claim that these culture wars were a mere distraction from another, more important branch of the neoliberal-neoconservative family tree. But we now see a version of neoliberalism without the culture war tendencies. A version not without its own campaigns to be waged against neoliberal, managerial approaches to education. (Victoria University is out on strike and picket at this very moment, campaigning against the announced 270 job losses.)

Another barometer of a new mood might be Bryan Cooke's striking article on questions of education, history and politics—"Another Country"—in Traffic journal:

In what follows I would like to show how thinking about some of the different attitudes to the two different kinds of ‘countries’—those from which we are separated by space and those from which we are divided by time—can illuminate some of the assumptions that underlie many debates about the role of history in education. Comparing different modern attitudes to history and travel, I will discuss the question of why we might teach history in the first place, and why we might think it worthwhile to do so. In addition, I will use this comparison to try to show how attempts to ensure that teaching achieves certain outcomes (almost irrespective of what those outcomes are) can ironically end up preventing students from having any real encounter with the past, by imposing a kind of prophylactic between them and the historical material upon which they are supposed to be reflecting. In referring to a ‘real encounter’ I am not naively suggesting that the goal of history should be historical simulations of sufficient verisimilitude to fool a real Cathar or an actual Victorian chimney-sweep. The only necessary (although obviously not sufficient) condition for such an encounter to take place is that any confrontation with historical
materials is not totally subordinated in advance to the function of flattering one of the prevailing ideologies of the age. Such flattery can be directed at any number of contemporary prejudices, the prejudices of the ostensible left as much as the putative right; the vanity of the students as much as the designers of curricula. But history cannot, I argue, be history without entailing a risk—which can never be completely eliminated without turning teaching into ‘management’, as the corporate world uses the term. Such a replacement would itself be an unfortunate step towards the substitution of democratic and humanistic ideals for technocratic/managerial ones; a process that may be going a little too smoothly of its own accord without making
peremptory concessions.

And, while you're there, you can also find a publication of mine in the very same issue: it is concerned with ostalgie and German film. (But who isn't, I ask you?)

Ghosts of the RAF

Once you've looked at Emmy/Anwyn/a_'s poetry in Overland, click through to Andrew McCann's article on the "literary afterlife" of the Red Army Faction. Or "Militancy and Melancholia," as he titles it.

Put together before the release of Baader Meinhof Complex, the article focuses instead on a couple of RAF books.

It opens, though, with the image of Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 series of RAF portraits hanging in New York's MoMA, mere months after the 9/11 attacks.

Richter’s sequence was finished in the late 1980s, and sold to MoMA in 1995. At that point, it might have seemed as if the moment of its relevance had passed. Today, the sequence is merely the most prominent manifestation of a recent artistic infatuation with the political subcultures that developed in the wake of 1968. In Germany, the contemporary fascination with the Red Army Faction has led to a flood of films, artworks and biographies. In an Anglophone context, the same trend is evident in relation to the American urban guerrilla group, the Weather Underground. And, of course, the academy is never far behind the market: academic work on these subcultures and their ambivalent afterlife also seems to be burgeoning.

The timing is hardly coincidental. With the West paralysed by a fear of terrorism that is also driving its military adventurism, the spectres of the 1960s and 1970s appear as uncanny projections of political disquiet that doesn’t quite know how to articulate itself. Hence the utterly confused and extremely variable forms of affect that attach to these images of left-wing militancy: from the ambivalently celebratory, James Dean-like portrait of Andreas Baader in Christopher Roth’s 2001 film Baader, to the often shamed, somewhat abject responses of academics eager to rethink their youthful identifications in the wake of more recent events. At both poles, the earlier radical subcultures appear as avatars of defeat and error. In them, we see the disaster of an ideology that didn’t have the rigour or the patience or the tactical know-how to actualise itself, and became irrationally violent as a result. As Emily Apter puts it, ‘a revolutionary stance of ethical militance’ was thus ‘compromised by the impetus towards militarisation’.

Middle class fantasy

Yes yes. This is not news, but in the present environment it's particularly baffling.

Rupert Murdoch - Australia's very own salaried nonsense-tycoon, charged with peddling nonsense around the globe - has set us all straight on the future: it will be a middle-class one. Phew.

One of the most under-reported stories of our day is the rise of a huge new global middle class.

People have emerged from poverty or, I should say, have lifted themselves out of poverty, given this chance through market reforms. A world dominated by a new middle class, of course, is not what supposed radicals had in mind a century ago when they spoke of revolution.

Get your hand off it, gramps.

I submit as countervailing evidence - from a field of hundreds - the Habermas article linked just below, if only because it is close to hand:

In America and Great Britain...the political elites viewed the wild speculation as useful as long as things were going well. And Europe succumbed to the Washington Consensus. In this regard there was also a broad coalition of the willing for which Mr. Rumsfeld didn't need to advertise.

Die Zeit: The Washington Consensus was the notorious economic plan proposed the IMF and the World Bank in 1990 that was supposed to provide the template for economic reform, first in Latin America and then throughout half of the world. Its central promise was "Trickle Down": led the rich become richer and affluence will trickle down to the poor.

Empirical evidence of the falsehood of this prognosis has been accumulating for many years. The effects of the increase in affluence are so asymmetrical, at both the national and the global level, that the zones of poverty have grown before our very eyes.

Nevertheless, Murdoch gets to propagate these lies through his very own newspaper (The Australian) and through the annual Australian government-funded ABC lecture series ('The Boyer Lectures').

Habermas in/on crisis

Sign and Sight translate a recent interview with Habermas:

Let's confront the past a bit: How did it come to this? Did the end of the communist threat strip capitalism of its inhibitions?

The form of capitalism reined in by nation-states and Keynesian economic policies – which, after all, conferred historically unprecedented levels of prosperity on the OECD countries – came to an end somewhat earlier, already with the abandonment of the system of fixed exchange rates and the oil crisis. The economic theory of the Chicago School already acquired practical influence under Reagan and Thatcher. This merely continued under Clinton and New Labour – and during the period as British chancellor of the exchequer of our most recent hero Gordon Brown. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a fatal triumphalism in the West. The feeling of being among the winners of world history is seductive. In this case it contributed to inflating a theory of economic policy into a worldview permeating all areas of life.

Neoliberalism is a form of life. All citizens are supposed to become entrepreneurs of their own labour power and to become customers...

...and competitors. The stronger who win out in the free-for-all of the competitive society can claim this success as their personal merit. It is deeply comical how managers – though not just them – fall prey to the absurd elitist rhetoric of our talk shows, let themselves be celebrated in all seriousness as role models and mentally place themselves above the rest of society. It's as if they could no longer appreciate the difference between functional elites and the ascriptive elites of estates in early modern societies. What is so admirable about the character and mentality of people in leading positions who do their job in a halfway competent manner? Another alarm signal was the Bush Doctrine announced in Fall 2002, which laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq. The social Darwinist potential of market fundamentalism has since become apparent in foreign policy as well as in social policy.

It's patchy, but worth a look.

Not the financial crisis

This is Cornelius Castoriadis in 1989:

we may say that there cannot not be a crisis of the identification process, since there is no self-representation of society as the seat of meaning and of value, no self-representation of society as inserted in a history that is past and to come, itself endowed with meaning not 'by itself' but by the society that is constantly reliving it and recreating it in this way. These are the pillars of an ultimate identification with a highly cathected 'we', and it is this 'we' that is today becoming dislocated. Society is now posited, by each individual, as a mere 'constraint' imposed on the individual - a monstrous illusion, but one lived so vividly that it is becoming a material, tangible fact, the indicator of a process of desocialization - and yet, simultaneously and contradictorily, it is to this society, illusorily lived today as an external 'constraint', that the individual also addresses uninterrupted demands for assistance. And with this contradictory attitude toward society comes the complementary illusion that history is, at best, a tourist attraction to be visited during a vacation.

Castoriadis is not necessarily putting forward a wholly novel argument (particularly not for us, 19 years later), but this has some similarity to Dufour's argument in (the much more recent) The Art of Shrinking Heads. What differences there are mostly stem from their theoretical attachments - Castoriadis to Freud, Dufour to Lacan. But the shape of the argument - the dwindling meaning of a big Other (Dufour) or social imaginary significations (Castoriadis) - responds to a similar interest: locating a reason, beyond mere reference to "neoliberalism" but certainly within the processes it unleashes, for the decline of social attachments and the upswing in pseudo-individualism. ("Pseudo," for Castoriadis, because he argues that we actually see a stronger conformism now, despite the language of individualism.) Castoriadis argues that there is no "meaning lived as imperishable by the men and women of today."

What Castoriadis says in this piece can be taken in a number of different directions - and the question time which followed the spoken version of this paper (all reprinted as "The Crisis of the Identification Process" in Thesis Eleven, n49, 1997) certainly does engage Cornelius on a few different topics.

Nevertheless, the year is interesting to me. 1989. In Germany, a few months later, we have a notionally reunified/reunifying nation. At this point, a whole sector of the population come into a society in which, according to Castoriadis, socially instituted meanings and values are displaced. As has been documented and mentioned regularly, the intial euphoria of this westward pouring soon turned sour for many. I need to do further research on this, but I have an early hypothesis that at least one explanation for this disappointment would lay in a strong disjunct between the social imaginary significations of these two places (the GDR and the FDR). Even if the GDR was going to shit in its final years, one of the arguments strongly made by Alexei Yurchak is that right up until the end, many within the communist populations held strong attachments to the values of the communist idea (or hypothesis, as Badiou/Sartre might have).

This was the case even as they bought sly copies of Western rock music and dressed themselves up in Levis. As such, the very things that held the GDR together (or Soviet society, in Yurchak's case), are those significations which that the society makes together, sometimes in spite of itself. As Castoriadis himself relates in response to a question, "Totalitarianism certainly failed in reality, but nothing guaranteed that it had to fail. This is undoubtedly what Orwell, too, had in mind when, at the end of 1984, totalitarianism's greatest triumph is achieved not through violence but through the fact that Winston Smith cries because he loves Big Brother - that is, he has internalized Big Brother completely." There's a dynamic at work between the communist systems of surveillance (predicated, of course, on a deep mistrust) and the actual attachment to a certain portion of the party-state's envisoned future (gleaming, communal, modern, progressive etc).

"Every society creates its own world in creating the significations that are specific to it," Castoriadis says. "Indeed, it creates a magma of significations, such as the...significations that go with the emergence of capitalist society (or, more exactly, of the capitalist component of modern society)." Or the communist system.

For Castoriadis these significations have three roles or functions (hold the 'functionalism'):

1. "They are what structure the representations of the world in general, without which there can be no human beings. These structures are each time specific: our world is not the ancient Greek world, and the trees we see beyond these windows do not each shelter a nymph; it's just wood, we say, which is a construction characteristic of the modern world."
   
2. "These significations designate the finalities or ends of action; they dictate what is to be done and not to be done, what is good to do and not good to do. One should, for example, adore God or, perhaps, accumulate the forces of production - whereas no natural or biological law, nor even any psychical one, says that one must adore God or accumulate the forces of production."
3. And the most difficult to grasp, he admits, "these significations establish the types of affects that are characteristic of a society. For example, there clearly is an affect that is created by Christianity, which is faith. We know or believe we know what faith is, this nearly indescribable sentiment that establishes a relationship with an infinitely superior being whom one loves, who loves you, who can punish you, all of this steeped in a strange psychical humidity, and so on and so forth. This sort of faith would be absolutely incomprehensible to Aristotle: for, what can this idea really mean, that one might love the gods or be loved by the gods in this fashion, be possessed by these affects, the undeniable expression of which can be seen on the faces of the true faithful in Bethlehem on any given Christmas Eve? This affect is social-historically instituted, and one can point to the person who created it: the apostle Paul. With the de-Christianization that has occurred in modern societies, it is no longer as present as it once was. But there really are affects that are characteristic of capitalist society, too. Without entering into a description that would risk taking a merely literary turn, allow me to recall that Marx described these capitalist affects very well when he spoke of a perpetual restlessness, constant change, a thirst for the new for the sake of the new and for more for the sake of more - in short, a set of socially instituted affects."
   

There is much more to be said about this - if not done with it: particularly with the idea that nostalgia may well be one of the affects of our age, as one could take Jameson to suggest. But I think it's striking enough to warrant this provisional post.

In a sense, Castoriadis is trying to have it both ways in this paper, suggesting that the crisis of identification is both an outcome of neoliberalism in the West and a more dispersed global phenomenon. The West, I think it's safe to extrapolate from his three page spray at contemporary Europe toward the end, is held by Castoriadis to be leading the way: "we are living the society of 'hobbies and lobbies'." (Zing!)

Consequently, to make this analysis work in the post-communist or 'transition' context, a certain amount of careful navigation needs to happen. In particular, one should be particularly mindful to maintain in view - as the horizon, even - Castoriadis' strong emphasis on the subject's capacity for creativity. That is, to steer away from simply quoting the bracing social critique without due reference to Castoriadis' complex theoretical schemata.

Public art strategy

Excuse the large deviation from this blog's nominal topic. I'm not even going to try to tie this in...

I just read Owen Hatherley's piece on roadside architecture in Britain:

Today’s landscape is morphed and sullied by the car via all sorts of underinvestigated types, from out-of-town shopping centres to drive-ins, business parks and hotels, the Americanised space hymned by JG Ballard, who in the eighties claimed “the future is going to be boring”.

This boredom is represented very neatly in the architecture the car currently inspires.

The situation, for a number of reasons, is rather different in Australia. Like home ownership, the ownership of a car is held to be something like an inalienable human right in Australia. More than this, though, the car is a key mythological symbol in contemporary Australia. The road, even more so. This supremacy of the vehicle and highway recalls the situation in the US, except Australia has its own versions of this modernist frontier narrative. See Mad Max. Listen to The Triffids. Read Meaghan Morris. Skim Graeme Davison.

A debate about the merits of public transportation and private transportation is ongoing in Australia. It's fairly heated in Melbourne at the moment, as the state government insists on building large freeway projects and neglecting a PPP rail network.

EastLink is one of the recent freeway projects. A toll road, it arcs around the belly of this sprawling city's eastern suburbs, delivering city drivers to the Mornington Peninsula and vice versa. The road, it seems, has not been as popular as projected - although one of the hallmarks of such constructions is the way in which they launch housing prices upwards and thereby increase the 'desirability' of certain suburbs around them. The fallow fields next to the freeway will be sprouting houses soon enough.

"Desiring Machine" by Simeon Nelson

One of the selling points of this road - alongside "extensive park and wetlands for native plants and animals" - is that it is dotted by public art projects. These must form part of what their website calls "eye catching urban design features."

"Hotel" by Callum Morton

The best of these is Callum Morton's "Hotel." This is part of an ongoing exploration by Morton of the anonymous international hotel space. In his "Valhalla" and "Babylonia" installations (see them here), external structures of 'ruins' and a cave harbour blank luxury-hotel corridors and foyers. The "Hotel" piece is a scaled-down version of a tall, uninspiring hotel structure. Less luxury, this one, and more family-roadtrip pitstop. Although you can't go inside, its windows blink at night, glowing blue as its imagined visitors distractedly flick through channels of - what? Porn and chat shows? The scale - it must be about 2/3rds, enough to make a normal-sized human not-quite-fit - and semblance and feasible roadside position make the structure uncanny, sure to make many do a double-take.

But there's more than art on EastLink. Cyclists and walkers can wander the EastLink Trail. May a thousand Iain Sinclairs bloom: the trail "includes vantage points from which to enjoy the EastLink Environment." (Capital E!) This is a nod to the exigencies of the car-dictated suburban environment in Melbourne, with its poorly provisioned estates and momentarily glamorous housing developments. (These were once called exurbs, but that feels a bit dated.) What better way to get some exercise than by walking along the road which takes you to work each day.

This type of activity is both encouraged and admonished. A large warehouse along the freeway - somewhere around Dandenong, I believe - carries an injunction in the form of its occupier's brand slogan: "Work. Don't play." This peculiarly aggressive and patrician invocation seeks a strong-armed embrace of alienation. No time to recreate, fuckers, keep working.

These slogans form part of the entertainment for those driving the road's sleek and smooth new lanes. This is "the sad anomie of the individual bunkered in the car," as Owen puts it, "refusing to get on the train that would get them there in half the time." But the car has its pleasures. The car has always been for me one of my favourite places to listen to music. There I get to do it loudly and with a focus I barely manage elsewhere.

"Public Art Strategy" by Emily Floyd

Out along EastLink, trains are barely an option. There are no trains servicing large parts of this tract. Consequently, the public art - let alone the "eye catching urban design features" - plays the role of product differentiator. With a number of other roads leading to the same destinations - the CBD, other eastern suburbs, the Peninsula - the toll road must spruik for trade. Aside from the art, a primary attraction for the driver is its lack of congestion. In a city growing by over a thousand people each week, with little affordable new housing anywhere near the city, the roads are busier for longer (peak-hour begins earlier and ends later, the midday drop off now barely perceptible) and bottles-up much further out from the city.

"Ellipsoidal Freeway Sculpture" by James Angus

Obviously, the toll has the effect of segregating commuters based upon financial means. Those who can afford the toll get the benefits of a pleasant, smooth driving experience: uncongested roads, endlessly serviced by a team of sub-contractors, with a smatter of public art curios installed next to the service lanes.

The art and architectural design features, then, aid the marketing and 'delivery' of a 'product' aimed at a more discerning commuter-consumer. In a city with an ailing public transport system, the roads have their own websites and art projects. In a (once?) neoliberal economy with little space for independent culture, the public art is given titles and content pointing to a certain self-consciousness about being involved in a road project - or, in the case of "Public Art Strategy," given to commenting on the controversy surrounding other public art projects.

And, in the final loose thread, it's perhaps in this context that middling singer-songwriters find the inspiration to film clips next to these arterials, staging something of their own public art extravaganza (I refer, specifically, to the reverse hat throw at 4:39):

Beyond the State

An otherwise dormant site posts a Badiou lecture: "Is the Word 'Communism' Forever Doomed?"

The lecture was given on Thursday, November 6, 2008 in New York.

Two interesting things in Badiou's biography, probably written by someone else:

1. "For many years a Maoist, [Badiou] remains a committed political activist." A transition, then - from 'committed' Maoist 'activist' (presumably) to 'committed political activist'. Is there no neat name for his current position?
   
2. Zizek's endorsement of Badiou: "His work aims at the very heart of politically correct radical intellectuals, undermining the foundations of their mode of life!" I suspect his work would be deeply boring and insular if he only aimed at this. Zizek is reading into Badiou a rather more Zizekian concern, no? Or is Zizek just being ironic? All those loaded terms....
   

Madly conflating

Always interesting to note the way that some people (like, you know, Arendt) insist on running together Nazism and Communism(/Bolshevism). People are still at it:

During these sessions Elke Urban models herself on Margot Honecker [above, beaming!], the leader's wife who was also a hardline education minister. She said that only one group had dared to stand up and defend the dissident pupil during her classes. "I deliberately create a totalitarian atmosphere and I am still always shocked how quickly and easily people are conditioned by it," she said. "East Germany may have left a pile of Stasi files behind rather than a pile of corpses, but the similarities with the Nazi regime are there."

"Nazi, Stasi, Germany's festering half-rhyme," as Garton-Ash has put it.

Trouble is, they then go on to show up why that argument doesn't really hold water.

But museum directors like Ms Urban are not ready to apply the same techniques to the Nazi era. "There are too many neo-Nazis around who would probably relish the chance of sitting in a National Socialist classroom. We don't dare to do it."

Zizek has been fairly clear on this, now Badiou is also saying it often: there is something worth retrieving in communism, in spite of its horrific manifestations. The difference, surely, is a matter of the political and ethical commitments mouthed by these two 'totalitarianisms', the kernels of these two different politics. The idea of an equal, inclusive society makes intuitive sense; the idea of a society riven by friend-enemy distinctions* along race/ethnic lines, not so much; the idea of a teacher inculcating values of community and fairness is OK; the idea of a teacher slagging off Jews and running out the gamut of inhuman insults about abject outsiders, not so good.

[*Clearly this was trotted (!) out in Soviet times too, but I think the retrievable kernel(s) are about first principles: there is an argument, which even Arednt kind of admits, that the early days of Soviet Communism were not so concerned with bloodletting and opening up these internal fronts. Those grand days of peasant kicking were yet to come. Instead, we're talking about Russia, 1917. Although perhaps, to be fair, we should be talking about Berlin, 1933? Were Jews integral to Nazism, or a kind of lynchpin -- as Bauman argues in Holocaust and Modernity? Could it have been anyone, or did it have to be the Jews, perverse lodestone of many a nationalist dunce? Is it not just about the structure of us-versus-them, a question of extreme and violently instrumentalised boundary maintenance?]

S.N. Eisenstadt puts these matters in a helpful light in his recent two volume work, Comparative Civilisations and Multiple Modernities -- both a doorstopper and a bravura performance.

It was in so far as such multifaceted modes of construction of collective identities and of strong but flexible centres faltered that the two major forms of absolutising tendencies, bearing within themselves the kernels of barbarism, of destruction, of drastic exclusion, demonisation and annihilation of others -- the Communist and the extreme fascist, especially the National Socialist movements and regimes -- triumphed.

Within each of these movements and regimes instituted by them there developed strong tendencies to exclusivism and to barbarism -- as has been recently stressed in the discourse around Alan Besancon's theses about the equivalence of Communism and National Socialism in and around the publication [of] The Black Book of Communism. But contrary to the claim to a total equivalence of the barbaric tendencies of these two types of regimes, and despite many similarities between them, there was a crucial difference between them. This difference, as Leszek Kolakowski and Martin Malla have shown in their comments on Besancon, was rooted in the attitudes of these respective movements and regimes to the universalistic and concomitant potentially -- even if only potentially -- inclusivist components of the modern cultural and political program. The socialist and communist movements were fully set within the framework of the cultural program of modernity, above all of the Enlightenment and of the Revolutions, and their criticism of the modern capitalist bourgeois society was made in terms of non-completeness of the modern program -- entailing the potentiality of continual inclusion -- even if these potentialities were strongly counteracted by the barbaric exclusivist practices of these regimes rooted in their absolutising tendencies. Hence within the Communist movements and regimes with all their destructive annihilating forces there could develop tendencies of resistance which could at least potentially challenge the barbaric and exclusivist practices of the regimes.

The extreme fascist or national-socialist regimes, aimed above all at the reconstruction of the boundaries of modern collectivities, negated the universalistic components of the cultural program of modernity and promulgated ideologies and praxis of total exclusion, total barbarisation without possibilities of challenge from within to the total demonisation of the excluded. It is indeed when these two absolutising tendencies come together -- as in Cambodia -- that they give rise to some of the most gruesome aspects of modern barbarism.

Same, but different.

And on we go....

You know this one.

A CDU-convened panel in Germany has "called for an end to nostalgia about East Germany." Well, good luck.

I'd like to call for an end to self-satisfied parliamentary panels. But I think we'd both end up having about the same level of success.

There's a kind of tiring inevitability about this kind of thing. You know: young CDU members have started an anti-ostalgie brigade. "She agreed with social scientist Schroeder that unemployment and economic deprivation should not be an excuse to paint a glossy picture of life in East Germany." "We have to honor their achievements in adapting to a completely different environment."

Etc. Etc.

Social scientists should not be an excuse to trundle out the same old garbage, I say. The report pulls off the familiar move of pointing toward "economic deprivation" and "unemployment," then wandering off in another direction entirely as if these idiots from the chancellor's party weren't fundamental to that problem.

(Pic via Flickr)

Capitalism, the mini-series

Between reading the new translation of Dany-Robert Dufour's The Art of Shrinking Heads and getting caught up in coverage of the current capitalist market kerfuffle, it's a dizzying time. More on Dufour another day.

Over at Eurhythmania, you can find posted a piece published today by the previously celebrated Australian journalist/writer (I hedge bets here, depending on your predilections) Guy Rundle. He's over in America currently, covering the election for a few Australian outlets.

Before today, I had been sceptical about the meaning of this trumpeted crisis. On one hand, it seemed like leftist pants-wetting: 'the crisis is here, the crisis is here!' On the other, it seemed like a crisis provoked, diagnosed and (in theory) cured by outsized capitalists. Dennis Kucinich suggested as much on DemocracyNow! yesterday: "It seems to me there’s a possibility that this crisis has a little bit of manufacture to it."

This disposition on my behalf was a function, I think, of distance: in the sense of being, shall we say, disembedded from the most often mentioned, most deeply effected circuits -- I have no mortgage, no shares etc -- but also in the sense of being in Australia. It just did not seem to have hit as hard over here. (I speak specifically, by the way, of the past few weeks. There has been some noticeable, earlier fallout on mortgages etc. But even that seems relatively minor compared to the US disasters.)

But now, I think, there is something afoot. And Guy Rundle's piece gets at that.

But here is what is really, really important to understand about this current event is that this is not merely a financial system crisis – that is a mere ripple of a much deeper problem. Desperate to gain some political capital out of this, the right have been suggesting that the problem is over-regulation, which is mad. But no less illusory is the centre-left assertion that the problem is simply one of lack of regulation, and that if a proper framework could be put in place everything would be all right.

For the great truth of this mess is that the folks who designed the deregulation were, in a narrow sense, right -- if their goal was to give western capitalism another lease of life. What the market faced in the US at the end of the 90s, was a crucial lack of things to invest in, for the free money sloshing around the markets. By 2001, the dotcom bubble had burst and you couldn't shove $X billion into Ewidgets.com, and so there was a desperate need for another object that would keep the circus going. Mortgage backed securities was it – bricks and mortar, which looked like the most concrete investment was actually the most abstract, the notional capacity of people with no-deposit mortgages to repay.

Crazy, but what could you do? For the bitter fact is that without these pseudo-investments, the West is running on fumes. As China and the East roars ahead in classical 19th century high capitalist mode, the West runs on financial services, and rents – such as intellectual property, and debt and debt and debt.

Thwarted thunderbolts

The even-keeled Sheila Fitzpatrick navigates 970 pages of a Solzhenitsyn biography and lives to (re)tell the tale. It's perhaps the best -- relatively short -- assessment of the Russian author.

The Soviet Union’s collapse paved the way for Solzhenitsyn’s return in 1994, which he staged with typical élan and instinct for publicity, taking a train from Vladivostok and proceeding through the length of Russia to Moscow. There isn’t a theatre director in the world who could have thought that one up, [biographer] Saraskina comments (admiringly). It was intended as the return of the Prophet Vindicated, filmed in every detail by the BBC, but it didn’t quite come off. Too late, many said; a great figure, but now irrelevant. Solzhenitsyn was equal to that, plunging again into one of his favourite roles, that of Jeremiah. The Russia he discovered in the mid-1990s was a moral sink, national consciousness and spiritual traditions lost, criminality rampant, party and Duma politics contemptible, the plight of the Russian people appalling and ignored by the new-rich rulers, privatisation a theft of public assets in broad daylight, Russia’s ‘liberal’ intellectuals as posturing and out of touch as ever, the break-up of the empire and consequent loss of Russia’s ‘iconic regions, outlets to the sea, and millions of Russian people’ a catastrophe, ‘shock therapy’ an outrage, even the Russian language corrupted. As for the free Russian press, they were a bunch of jackals, worse than the Cheka.

(pic via Flickr)

North East

Photographer Eric Lafforgue: "Pyongyang view, taken from Yanggakdo hotel. You can find a famous satellite picture on the net showing a map of the Korean peninsula by night, with a huge difference between the north and south. In North Korea, there is no public lighting, and people use very low wattage bulbs in their houses. The North Korean capital is as surreal by night as it is by day. Due to the fuel crisis there's hardly any traffic to be heard after dark, and nightlife is virtually non-existent. Only monuments are lit during local festivities. Every hour, on the hour, from 6 am to midnight, loudspeakers blast out a patriotic song. Tourists are totally forbidden from leaving their hotels to walk around town, even though Pyongyang is safe, that's the rule."

This is what a feminist looks like?

More photos of North Korea at The Big Picture. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the country.

Photos: (c) Eric Lafforgue; AP Photo/Kyodo News

Radical contingency

I miss, by a few days, the London V&A "Cold War Modern" exhibition (as reviewed in New Statesman by Owen, with characteristic insight).

This is like a sick joke, arranged by travel agents, airlines and my brother. Christ.

Soft Focus History

As mentioned previously, I've been preparing some papers—both written and spoken.

The content of this post forms part of what became my university confirmation seminar paper. It will also be published in a forthcoming journal article. It is an introductory section, concerned with getting some of these ideas around ostalgie to crack a bit under the weight of analysis, to push the "object to the point where that object destroys its own illusion," as Mr Bctzoiwp puts it. I am talking here and in the paper more broadly about the relation of nostalgia to three films—Sonnenallee, Good Bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others.

~

It's reported by Edward S Casey that there's a piece of graffiti in Paris that reads: 'Nostalgia is not what it used to be.' This says a lot and opens a few gaps for thinking about the topic. One of the questions rarely asked by cultural analysis of ostalgie is a simple one: what is nostalgia? Is it: a state of being, that is an ontological homesickness; is it a kind of pathology or recurring error; is it a form or phase of mourning; is it a transient disposition due to circumstances; is it a mere passing mood, encountered about 3pm each Sunday afternoon? The common, everyday response, of course, is pejorative. Nostalgia is a longing for the past which buffs away rough edges, a kind of soft-focus history. It's, at best, diversionary and pleasant, at worst, wrongheaded and dangerous.

To complicate this with some more precise terms and reflection, we can propose that: nostalgia is a feeling at the interface of individual and collective remembrance. It is often a personal mode of remembrance populated by items belonging to the 'collective'—that is, circulating goods and specific locations. It's often a compression of time and place, biography and history. As Casey writes, "this paradoxical interplay of the definite and the indefinite in space as well as in time…gives rise to nostalgia's baffling combination of the sweet and the bitter, the personal and the impersonal, distance and proximity, presence and absence, place and no-place, imagination and memory, memory and nonmemory." This is one of the chief reasons for its conceptual difficulty.

However, in discussing cultural forms—films or otherwise—we get access to one juncture of the individual-collective interaction, be it set up in distinction or compliance with the common understandings of particular plots of collective memory. Refining further, we could say: nostalgia represents a mode of orientation to the past, an act of remembrance calling on social cues and individual biography. To say this, though, is to open up another question elided by much discussion of ostalgie: where does nostalgia reside? Often, films and other cultural forms are invoked as 'ostalgic'—but is it possible that a reel of celluloid or a book alone can be nostalgic? I will not answer this question here, but it forms a kind of background thought throughout much of this essay. I will return to it in closing.

One matter which recurs in the broader literature on nostalgia is the feeling of a deepening in its presence over the past thirty years in the West. To provide only a quick catalogue of the reasons given for this: we are embedded an overarching 'postmodern' epoch; we have seen the rise of visual, screen culture; the decline of long-running personal and institutional attachments through the individuation of 'second modernity'; an amnesia in contemporary culture, despite ever greater digital archives. In many senses, then, according to these accounts, all three of the films analysed here are films of their time. For one, they fit within a broader movement of nostalgia films seen over the past three decades, a cultural mood about which Pam Cook's writings on British and Hollywood nostalgia films makes us aware. And all three are undeniably postmodern nostalgia films in Jameson's sense, rendering the past in a 'consumable set of images,' ticking all the boxes he offers: 'music, fashion, hairstyles and vehicles'. They carry within them an inventory not of 'facts or historical realities (although [such a film's] items are not invented and are in some sense 'authentic'), but rather a list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts
and historical realities.' In Jameson, of course, this links up to a broader denigration of postmodern nostalgia culture—denigrated for its purported lack of depth and its association with a crass commercial culture—a position which I do not wish to take up and which has already been widely critiqued. I would briefly note here, though, that both Sonnenallee and Good Bye Lenin! derive much of their comic value from dealing ironically and subversively with the very stereotypes they show on screen.

Thus if Jameson's description of the 'nostalgia film' on one level rings true but can be seen as problematised by at least two of the films discussed here, those films also underscore a problem with the negative cast nostalgia generally receives in the critical corpus. For one, these po-faced theories are inadequate in the face of comedic and ironic deployments of nostalgia. Yet perhaps the bigger problem with the dominant denigration is its paralysis on questions of the losses to which nostalgia may be a response—even as it's laughing. At its worst, such a negative characterisation of nostalgia does not admit of the pleasures nostalgia can offer—therein foreclosing a genuine understanding of the feeling, disregarding the phenomenology of the nostalgic. This confusion is understandable, as I have noted. Nostalgia is notoriously hard to pin down: 'nostalgia remains unsystematic and unsynthesizable,' Boym writes, 'it seduces rather than convinces.' Across the diversity of understandings and interpretations, across its manifold attachments to the present and politics, nostalgia culture is saddled with a paradox, as Radstone has outlined: "While [on the one hand] nostalgia is criticised for its commodification of the past—for its transforming of the past into a publicly traded commodity—it is also [on the other] conversely criticised for turning social change into private affect."

So if nostalgia is thus swatted every which way it turns, how can we turn it into a productive concept? A number of theorists—from Linda Hutcheon to Foucault to a handful of lesser known psychoanalysts—have offered relatively nuanced takes on the phenomenon. Psychoanalysis directs us to the essential basis of nostalgia: another version of the 'grass is always greener' modality, nostalgia functions as a necessary psychic buttress, a sunny counterpart to the ongoing disappointments in failing to achieve contentment. This is psychoanalysis in its anti-utopian mode. Beyond such a psychoanalytic account, Russian-born US-based academic Svetlana Boym has given us a useful schematic for post-communist nostalgia in the characterisation offered in her book The Future of Nostalgia. This dyadic scheme disarticulates divergent responses to the same impulse, to the seeking of comfort in the past—one of them unaware of its nostalgic gloss, one playfully aware of its daydreaming. Such a characterisation fits with the two dominant yet divergent critical accounts of nostalgia, but Boym valorises them in a way different from other writers: at one end, the consumerist and playful version of nostalgia, usually derided, is offered as a positive, or at least amiable and harmless, style of remembrance; at the other, a bracingly serious, politically valenced embrace of what we might sometimes call 'invented traditions,' is held to be dangerous. To explain this distinction further: Restorative nostalgia, for Boym, defies a linear conception of history in the quest to reconstruct a lost home, understanding itself as seeking truth and tradition. Dead serious, it reconstructs 'emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialise time.' This is the type of nostalgia at the heart of much nationalism. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, circles the past in a wistful and ironic fashion. It dwells, ambivalently, on longing and belonging. It has no singular plot, ranging across dispersed places at once; ensconced in details, not symbols. Reflective nostalgia in this mode is 'not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias'—it is more creative and useful than the common caricature of nostalgia would allow.

While helpfully moving us away from commonplaces about nostalgia, this bifurcated scheme is limited in what it can proffer for the analysis of Ostalgie. Boym is upfront in admitting that these two forms are endpoints on a continuum of nostalgia types. She also offers some illuminating examples of cases she sees fitting these types of nostalgia. Nevertheless, such clear-cut binary categories ultimately offer an all-too-easy checklist, a kind of shortcut to analysis. If we follow her model, the meanings and significance of these nostalgias—what might be called their politics—go unnoticed. As Radstone reminds us, "debates concerning the politics of nostalgia require analyses of nostalgia culture that differentiate between its varieties, and that attend to the specificities of nostalgia culture's representations of the past, its strategies of address and its appeal." That is to say, an analysis that merely noticed ostalgic phenomenon and shifted them into one of Boym's two categories would be deeply flawed—one must draw apart this simplistic 'ostalgie' concept, to name its parts, to precisely call it by different names, to notice different species, different attenuations, different imperatives. The journalistic tendency to conflate ostalgie pays little attention to these qualitative differences. German reportage on this score does, of course, vary from the warmly dismissive to the tabloid panic styles, but in some ways this just alerts us to the need to avoid the temptation to come up with similarly neat categorisations in an academic context. This requires reflection on the very status of nostalgia. One of the questions we should ask of these films, for example, is a complex one: what makes a film about memory and not history? These two terms—memory and history—form a binary which has structured much recent academic analysis. This is literature which I do not wish to navigate here, but the distinction remains worth keeping in mind: why have these films been classified as nostalgic? Are the films—as texts—nostalgic? Or do they merely depict nostalgia? Are they not just more in a line of German historical dramas? If not, how are they different?

As I have already implied, ostalgie could be both of Boym's forms at the same time. It can be: postmodern capitalism's 'playful reappropriation of the everyday objects of East German culture,' be it the market in GDR pedestrian traffic lights or the Trabant car; or Ostalgie 'may be a reclamation of one's own biography, recalling happy times that are excluded from those discourses that reduce life in the GDR to the experience of oppression'; or, perhaps in a more fundamentally political way, it can represent 'an insistence upon a distinct set of East German values born out of the GDR past, such as a solidarity that challenges the supposed 'Ellbogenmentalität' [elbowing-out mentality—i.e. single minded pursuit of one's own interests] of Western capitalism.' These three types—and there are more—interleave in manifold ways. Radstone alerts us to this complicated tenor of any nostalgia—the manner in which affect, politics, biography and time blur in a text or set of texts that might all too easily be cast as nostalgic. The question must always be, nostalgic for what, for when, for whom—and, if it seems relevant, to what end. In analysing these films, then, we need to be awake, all at once, to the textual specificities of film—that is, its address, its appeal, its narrative choices—as well as to the historical and political specificities of production and reception.

Image taken from German Propaganda Archive.

The Healthy Body

This will all be wildly off topic, so apologies for those expecting commie kitsch, thoughts on Tacheles closing or a devastating analysis of the rise and rise of Die Linke! There are some nice ironic pictures about halfway through, so they're worth sticking around for....

I'm currently doing some research work for an academic looking at the water bottle as a modern thing, what it represents -- there's Latour, biopolitics, risk, neoliberal privatisation and many other theoretical bits floating around in the framing of the project. I don't get to touch most of that. I am just researching one specific campaign. I have managed, though, to spend a day or two reading Feher and Heller's 1994 slim book on biopolitics. (If you can't turn academic research jobs into explorations of pet topics/ideas/authors, what's the goddamn point?)

There's a clear sense in which this is a book written by people spooked by a far-reaching state. Presumably if you were in communist Hungary, saw 1956, had hopes crushed, academic positings withdrawn etc etc, this is something you'd be fairly careful about.

Nevertheless, they do a good job here of taking their longer view -- a fairly worked-through set of ideas about modernity's genesis and meanings (for them, in this context, it's an ongoing debate of life versus liberty) -- and marrying it to some contemporary analysis. So you get your Kant with some Rodney King race riots, your Hegel with some Andrea Dworkin and your Weber with anti-smoking campaigns.

It's this last point where we start to get crossover with the marketing of water bottles. I don't always fully agree with their positions, but they get in some cracking lines, paragraphs and, well, whole pages of analysis. Below is one of my favourites.

Since health politics demands that we force our sense of mortality into oblivion and continually remain fit labour machines, an odd version of the age-old dream of eternal youth also becomes one of ‘health’s’ metaphoric meanings. The politics of health runs a desperate race with time. It wants to bring time to a halt in order to raise the bodily state of the adolescent boy and girl to the pedestal of the ideal. The alliance of health politics with health industry makes this feature even more explicit.… Theoretically, one could expect at least an aesthetic yield from this exaggerated cult of youth, a new adoration of beauty. But the standards of youthfulness are technologically set; they aim at mass production. In the pursuit of health, biopolitics becomes unfaithful to the spirit of the post-modern. Instead of promoting ‘difference’—beauty as the mark of individuality—it promotes the production of ‘the healthy body’ en masse.

And just before this passage, they make a nice series of linkages between the stigma of being unhealthy, utilitarianism and the Protestant ethic.

He who commits ‘health crimes’ is ‘unreconstructed’ (a term of the re-education camps) and ‘contaminated’. Above all, he causes public expenditure (by the implied crime of eventually falling ill, being hospitalised, and perhaps even buried at public expense). Those who waste too much time discussing ‘progress,’ should rather compare the stone-hearted utilitarianism of health politics with medieval caritas. But the reference to ‘public expenditure,’ more than anything else, betrays that one of the major objectives of health politics is to restore the shattered Protestant work ethic to its abandoned central position, by reviving its neurotic self-discipline; its imperative to subject the individual to ‘public goals’ and the world of labour, as well as to Protestant work ethic’s inherent miserliness.

So the body -- our 'health' -- must be disciplined and punished. Health as a political metaphor can be seen, for them, in the various exhortations for the individual. Health, in such a setting

cannot be pursued without the binary of ‘friend and foe’. It is for this reason that the concept of ‘secondary smoking’ was created. It is not the general pollution of cities and the industrial environment, not AIDS, drugs, alcohol, the creeping back of tuberculosis (as well as other diseases which have never been mastered) that will cause our premature deaths but the results of Secondary Smoking. It is useless to waste time considering the ‘scientific basis’ of this inquisitorial concept. More important is to recognise its function. Our needs and habits no longer have a private character; we are directly responsible from them in front of the ‘public eye’. ‘Science’ has to be mobilised to ‘prove’ that in indulging in our particular health crime we endanger our fellow citizens, pollute (and thus abuse) our children, upset the mental peace of our neighbours, and contaminate the moral atmosphere. The conclusion is self-evident: either submit to the norm, or pay the penalty, perhaps la mort civile. This is what justifies sniffing the ‘secret smoker’ out of the toilet booth (as once the secret masturbator was sniffed out) and denouncing him without further delay or calling the guard to remove the perpetrator from the premises.…By and large the politics of health is successful insofar as it transplants a massive guilt feeling, the prerequisite for the victory of the course of ‘discipline and punish’, into the psyche of the individual. One sees on the same TV-set a host of young men and women who tell you that because they lost x pounds or kilos in their last diet, they no longer feel guilty.

In matters of water bottles and marketing, these healthy bodies are linked to healthy Nature. Drinking from those bottles, we undertake an ethic of care for the self/body -- health politics -- and for Nature -- environmental politics. We forego the less healthy choice -- sugary soft drinks, fattening milk, stimulant coffee -- in order to move closer to nature and purity, away from contamination and stigma/shame/guilt.

Following a kind of Weberian line, I wonder if this didn't represent re-enchantment of the water bottle: its messages and attachments are to connect [re-connect?] the consumer-as-body to nature, purity, clarity, a kind of singularity of nature, both universal (nature, the earth, the body) and particular (my body, my environment, my world). The tap is non-unique, anonymous, tracked by bureaucracy and water bills, immobile because owned by all. The bottle is unique, specific, instantly locatable and mobile.

(Pics via Flickr and Healthy Living Tip [?])

Polska posters

As if in some visual exercise of dialectics, Polish artists seem to take a Polish appreciation of illustration play it off against Hollywood film and come out with some genius synthesis. This Well Medicated post attests to as much, fifty times over. A Polish aesthetics for Hollywood?

Symposiasts, unite!

A break in the roaring silence. Fans will know that I have been busy elsewhere - jumping roundabouts and swinging on hurdles for University bureaucracy, teaching psychoanalysis to 17 year olds and laying awake at night thinking about the dissertationy things that I can't find the time to think about at any other point. The upshot of this is that new content will appear here, forthwith. Promise.

Nevertheless, the reason for this break in the static is to give later-than-late notice of a symposium at the University of Melbourne tomorrow. It takes on/up/over/aim at the topic of May '68. I paste below the official circular sent to me late today. (Breaking news!) I had thought of preparing a presentation on the (overwhelming) tinges of nostalgia in the remembrance of May '68. As it was, time got the better of me, and the topic seemed a fair stretch from my Easterly homepatch. Much too occidental a concern for me to dally with.

All are welcome to listen to the papers, and enjoy the provocation and opportunity to talk about revolting students!

The order of speakers is not yet confirmed, so if you wish to disregard the rest of us and only come to hear your favourite, I am afraid you will have to await a further update, or contact your pet directly.

Following the program is the general outline of the nature and intentions of the symposium.

Provocations of '68
A Social Theory Postgraduate Symposium

Friday 15th August
Multi-function Room, 1888 Building
The University of Melbourne
10am – 4pm

Welcome
9:30 - 10:00 am
Coffee and Tea in the Multifunction Room

Foreword
Assoc/Prof. John Rundell - 1968 and Social Theory

Session 1
10 – 12:00 am
Bryan Cooke - Cassius at the Carnival, or How much light does it take to be invisible?

Yoni Molad - The concept of the Situation in Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle'

Thea Potter - Les Cadres: from Revolution to Evolution

Sergio Mariscal - On Other '68s: Prague, Berlin and Mexico City

Session 2
1:00 – 2:30 pm
Stefan Siemsen - Intellectual Labour - Then and Now

James Field - Beyond the Barricades

Michael Ashcroft - Althusser and 1968

Afternoon Tea
2:30 – 3:00 pm

Roundtable discussion
3:00 – 4:00 pm
Moderated by Dr. John Cash

Afterword
Professor Ghassan Hage - Closing Remarks: The Meanings of 1968

Abstract/invitation/summary/prelude/outline/intentions
May ’68 stands as a loadstone to the imagination. With forty years hindsight interpretations of the significance of the events, the demands, the causes and consequences continue to provoke debate and the taking up of positions not only on the past but also on our current situation. Beyond the question of what ’68 was, taking a standpoint on ’68 entails the engagement with the content of ideology, practice and social change and its continuity or discontinuity with the present.

The events of ’68 were formative for a generation of French intellectuals that have become canonical. The responses of theorists and philosophers who observed and participated in the events of ‘68 acted (and still act) as a litmus test of their political positions. But ‘68 should not be seen only as a battle of intellectuals, particularly since the events were perhaps unprecedented to many of the thinkers that we associate with that time, challenging and provoking them to rethink positions towards both capitalist and socialist modernity.

And the social action of ’68 was not confined only to France or to a student uprising. In the Americas as much as in Europe movements contested the legitimacy of social life, of domination political and economic, of the ubiquity of state violence and the one dimensionality of work.

The intention of this symposium is to gather together for a day of presentations and discussion on the social, cultural and philosophical legacy of May ’68, to examine the debates around what happened, but also what was demanded, what were the causes, and what is the legacy of a failed revolution or a cultural watershed or a social movement.

(Pic via marcuse.org)

The main thing...

There is the issue of nostalgia culture’s place in the constitution of social identities and groups, and, by implication, the question of the ‘politics of nostalgia’: the question, that is, of the meanings and significance of the view(s) of the past offered by nostalgia culture. What [Radstone's] survey [of critical 'nostalgia' literature] does reveal is that debates concerning the politics of nostalgia require analyses of nostalgia culture that differentiate between its varieties, and that attend to the specificities of nostalgia culture’s representations of the past, its strategies of address and its appeal.
- Susannah Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory, 2007, p129. Emphasis mine.

Radstone names here one of the fundamental impulses in my work: to draw apart this simplistic 'ostalgie' concept, to name its parts, to precisely call it by different names, to notice different species, different attenuations, different imperatives. The journalistic variety of 'ostalgie' - wherein Good Bye Lenin! is posited as being the same as Trabant fan clubs or a post-unification justification of the Berlin Wall - pays little attention to these qualitative differences. The reportage does, of course, vary from the "oh, look at this backward whimsy" to the "hark! Communists among us!" varieties, but greater subtlety than this seems a lost hope.

(Until the emergence of my dissertation, when all will be right again in the world.)

(Pic via DHM)

Radstone

Brit academic Susannah Radstone visited Melbourne University last year. She has visited Australia multiple times, with research for her most recent book supported by ANU. Her works in the various corners of memory research are consistently some of the best writings in this field - an sometimes disappointing endlessly frustrating field. A serious, engaged and clear thinker, her writing arrives at deceptively simple conclusions. This masks the way she can clear away obfuscation and confusion. To wit:

We also need all the time to be asking whether there are inassimilable or incommensurable aspects to memory, and if so how they can be understood. In other words, we need to attend not only to the articulation of memory by the discourses and institutions of the public sphere, but also to the absences, gaps and slips produced by such articulations—absences that might beg questions concerning both memory’s incommensurability or untranslatability and questions of power, politics and recognition.…Without this dual focus, studies of memory will share with approaches grounded in identity politics a limited view of the processes, practices and institutions through which experience or memory make their mark and are made. Understandings of memory, that is, whether personal, social, collective or cultural, cannot be derived from experience and memory alone.

Which might sound self-evident, but you'd probably be amazed how much work on memory misses this dimension. Radstone has written elsewhere about what she notices as the impact of the 'ethical turn' in discussions of memory.

Antze and Lambek have pointed out that the contemporary emphasis on individual trauma and the recovery of personal memories of victimhood might be conceived of as ‘a triumph over the political… Here historical trauma is displaced by individual drama’. As Antze and Lambek go on to suggest, the current politics of memory and its associated culture of victimhood draw attention away from collective forces and issues, and produce a shift from collective obligations and modes of accountability to narratives of individual suffering and accusations of individual blame. Within this memory culture, a focus by memory studies on individual narratives of remembered suffering may be contributing to what Richard Sennett, deploying as yet unproblematised oppositional terms, described as people ‘working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning.’ Memory studies too, that is, with its focus on questions of personal suffering and individual testimony, may be viewed as contributing to what Sennett sees as ‘the erosion of the delicate balance between the public and the private.’

In discussing nostalgia, it is easy to slip into such an ultimately unsatisfactory stress on the individual. But retaining the dual focus Radstone outlines in the first excerpt (above) helps to guard against this.

(Quotes taken from Radstone's "Reconceiving Binaries: the Limits of Memory," History Workshop Journal, 59)
(Pic via Flickr.)

New News

I have been tagged by the proliferating educator meme. I will respond to this soon.

But, first, something briefer. Getting regular and relevant news is one of the challenges of studying the contemporary social/cultural/political phenomena of a country other than your own. Of course the intertubes have helped everyone become an instant (surface level) expert on all manner of arcane stuff. Access to news has, perhaps, never been greater -- even if much of it is just re-written press releases and unreflective reportage, there is a glimmer of news in there. But this all comes to naught if your area of interest speaks a different language; Google translator only gets you so far. Getting news from Russia, Germany and other places East is a continuing quest.

The English version of Der Spiegel is useful, their regular email newsletters keep pumping information down my intertube pipe daily. There was the much more old school (pure text! webpage frames!) German News translations via email, although this has recently shut down.

Russia has presented more difficulties. The Cold War winds are still blowing in much reporting of Russian politics and society. A certain judgement of 'backwardness' is still there in the arched eyebrows of many Western journalists. (And, to be sure, peniscopters aren't a regular occurrence in many other countries' politics, but that's arguably to everyone else's detriment.) In which case getting some less coloured material becomes an important task.

Window on Eurasia is a blog run by Paul Goble. He provides a set of three comprehensive articles each day. Often these are drawing from reports translated for the first time, which is invaluable. He (re-)reports regularly on new statistics and analysis about the population in post-communist Russia and elsewhere. Goble may have his own political pursuits -- "promoting Baltic independence and the withdrawal of Russian forces from those formerly occupied lands" -- but the reports don't seem unfairly tilted by this interest. He's currently working at Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, but has worked as an academic in Estonia and in the US public service. This included a stint in the CIA and Radio Free Europe (America's radio service into Soviet territory), which obviously needs to be borne in mind. (In related news, Radio Free Europe's research department is to close. A sign of political convergence? The propaganda for free markets and 'liberty' now too orthodox to be worth budgeting for?)

A scan over Goble's pieces in recent days yields some interesting material: "Kremlin’s Ties with Religions Said to be Strengthening ‘Archaic’ Elements in Each," "Russia’s Poor – Fewer in Number but Further Behind the Wealthy," "The Red Army Did Not Liberate East Europeans or the Russians Either, Moscow Commentator Says".

The latter, referring to the removal of the Soviet memorial in Estonia (see image above), presents the intriguing thesis of Igor Dzhordan:

Dzhordan’s core argument is as follows: The Soviet political system was based on “an institutionalized civil war. The USSR was the geographical-political form of the state of the civil war.” And consequently, when the CPSU was overthrown and the USSR dissolved, these were “the most important steps toward the end” of that civil conflict.

Consequently, after 1991, there was the promise of “civil peace” in which “force would no longer be the foundation of social life. But then Vladimir Putin created “a post-modernist cocktail,” in which thre was “(almost) the tsarist coat of arms and (almost) the Soviet hymn and in which the MVD traced its roots to Benckendorf and the FSB to Derzhinsky.”

Such a compound state needed some things from the tsarist system and some from the Soviet one, Dzhordan says, and one of the things it needed from the Soviet was “the myth of liberation,” the idea that the Soviet Red Army “liberated” Eastern Europe and thus justified the use of force at home and the Communist mission abroad.

Such a myth, of course, would have been “impossible” to insist upon “if it was not based on something real, on the genuine experience of a grandiose people’s war, which ended with a victory over Hitlerite Germany.” But the “integral” quality of this myth represents “its weak side.” One cannot allow any part of it to be challenged, or the entire myth disintegrates.

While one can no doubt argue against this analysis, it's an argument that wouldn't be possible without access to sources of news and debate inside Russia and its former satellites.

DDR Montage

Hopefully the silence is not awkward. I've been busily preparing two papers, one of them on 'insecurity' in post-communism, the other on some post-unification films in Germany. Bits and pieces from both might appear up here. Meanwhile, get your dance/trance on:


Classicists may prefer:


John Waters and Christoph Schlingensief fans may prefer:

Eagleton on Žižek on Everything

Two names already invoked on this here blog: Terry Eagleton reviews Slavoj Žižek's latest book of tenuously linked paragraphs, In Defense of Lost Causes. I haven't read it yet. But seems like it might contain some interesting arguments on the 'usefulness' of communism today. Which might have something to say about the nature of some nostalgia.

Žižek's already rehearsed some of these arguments, if not in full then at least by implication: the redemptive potentialities of communism's ideological edifice, which is not the same as the system which delivered the purges and the prisons and the phone tapping and the.... In the Parallax View, for instance, the 'eternal return of the same' invoked by Nietzsche is re-interpreted by Žižek: not the one-dimensional 'past as it was' (objective history), but the past with all redemptive potentialities intact. And in his review of The Lives of Others, he suggests that this is why there is more nostalgia for communism than there is for Nazism: communism had a much more positive set of politico-ethical ideas than Nazism -- and it's this program which people yearn for, not the grey totality of really-existing socialism.

This is all, of course, open to dispute. But I'll get the book and read the thing first.

(pic via Flickr, thanks to Andrew for Eagleton link)

The non-rational and ambiguity?

There are other more substantial posts waiting in the wings -- checking themselves in the mirror, brushing their shoulders off, preening their hair -- but a passing observation...

I think the appeal of Castoriadis clicked when I read this article abstract:

Neither Habermas nor his communitarian and poststructuralist critics sufficiently explore the non-linguistic, playful, and performative dimensions of contemporary public spheres. I argue that the approaches of Castoriadis and Touraine can inform a theoretical understanding of the history and current resonance of this public sphere of performance. Their concepts of the social imaginary, the autonomous society, and subjectivation highlight the role of fantasy, images, individualism, and other non-rational factors in late modern public life. (From the Imaginary to Subjectivation: Castoriadis and Touraine on the Performative Public Sphere by Tucker, Kenneth H., Jr in Thesis Eleven, Nov 2005; vol. 83)

Other non-rational factors in late modern public life. Snap! Memory or, more particularly, nostalgia is a non-rational encounter with the past -- and with the present. It follows no logic, other than, perhaps, this very shapeshifting rascal: the paradigm of non-rationality. It can be experienced in Proust's involuntary memory or the willful voluntary reminscience of pulling a family photograph from out of the draw. In both, however, the tracks of logic aren't traceable -- memory doesn't work by deductive or inductive argument but in fragments, frustrating as these are to analyse.

Castoriadis's imaginary fits more neatly with this than the dry circuits of Habermas. This is precisely the problem I've had with Habermas (the crypto-liberal, as my housemate put it the other night) and Beck (the crypto-liberal, if I may extrapolate). While doing well on describing various factors in the conditions of life under post/reflexive/cosmo-modern (Western) societies, they both fail to acknowledge the realm of ambiguity fundamental to human anthropology -- at the general level and particularly at the current conjuncture. Call it the social scientist impulse. Life, though, doesn't fit into a table, graph or series of bullet points. Much to no one's chagrin...

No doubt the lack of engagement with these non-rational factors is partly the very difficulty of talking about them in the academic argot. The strut and pose of the academic journal, monograph and conference loses its shimmer when one introduces doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity into its movement. A sign of weakness, it's whispered.

The nascent field of Memory Studies, for all its many faults (as spelt out by Radstone, Klein, Kansteiner and others), seems in its better moments to want to address this drive to will away ambiguity. Of course we must generally retain something like the apparatus of rationality and reason if we want to convey something to a reader -- as Habermas himself argued in his "performative contradiction" criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment -- but the point is to acknowledge the unknowability of certain things, the ambiguity of certain feelings, the strangeness of certain impulses. That sounds vague. And it is. But the will-to-explanation, as we might call it, seems like a stiff, macho academic pose. Memory is fuzzy. That is the challenge to academics everywhere engaged in saying something useful and enlightening about it. Castoriadis and other thinkers interested in the subject and imagination offer some nice ways of confronting this challenge.